Delhi High Court: Mukta Gupta, J., grants ad-interim injunction while restraining defendant from posting, publishing, sharing any content which is defamatory, derogatory or deprecatory in nature to the plaintiff, its management or employees.
The instant suit was filed by the plaintiff Whitehat Education Technology (P) Limited impleading Aniruddha Malpani as the defendant, inter alia, seeking permanent injunction restraining the defendant from defamation, infringement of trademark, dilution and tarnishing of trademarks, disparagement, damages, unfair competition etc.
Plaintiff claimed to be a start-up company teaching children the Coding, helping them build Games, Animation Apps. Further, the plaintiff submitted that it has developed a Proprietary Coding Curriculum focused on product creation and imparts lessons through live, interactive online classes.
According to the plaintiff, free classes are given to the students and on satisfaction, the students can then enrol themselves where there is no time-limit for the classes and even after availing few classes, if the students want to opt-out, the balance fee is refunded on the same day.
Plaintiff owns and operates a website under its domain name www. whitehatjr.com registered on 23-05-2018 and claims a strong presence on social media. Plaintiff has registered trademarks ‘WHITE HAT JR’ both as a wordmark and device marks.
Adding to the above, plaintiff submitted that in late September 2020, the plaintiff came across the defendant’s posts on Twitter referring to the registered trademarks of the plaintiff ‘WHITE HAT JR’ and issuing statements/posts amounting to defamation/disparagement/trademarks’ infringements, dilution and tarnishment of its trademarks.
Defendant submitted that the instant suit was not maintainable for want of territorial jurisdiction and added that it has not caused any defamation, derogation or its statements being deprecatory, for which the defendant needs to file his affidavit to present the correct facts.
Bench held that since some of the facts are alleged in the plaint are disputed and the same is required to be adjudicated, therefore at the present stage, a limited ad-interim injunction is required to be passed on plaintiff’s prima facie case resulting in an irreparable loss to the plaintiff as also keeping in view the balance of convenience lying in favour of the plaintiff.
Hence, the defendant is restrained from posting, publishing, sharing any content which is defamatory, derogatory or deprecatory in nature to the plaintiff, its management or employees.Defendant was also directed to take down the tweets.[Whitehat Education Technology (P) Ltd. v. Aniruddha Malpani, 2020 SCC OnLine Del 1616, decided on 24-11-2020]